It's Time! Enter My FIFTH Annual Oscars Picks Pool!
#307: Oscars pool, "Love Hurts," "Parthenope," "Rush Hour," "My Blind Brother"
Edition 307:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: I’m launching my annual Oscars pool with two weeks until the big day. I also saw a couple new movies in theaters and some good ol’ streamers I’ll tell you about. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Tim Robinson has a new comedy coming out that is getting early raves.
My 2025 Oscars Pool Is Here!!
Long, LONG gone are the days when the Oscars were a national monocultural event only a half-step down from the Super Bowl in relevance. While I don’t know first hand, it sure seems like if we dropped into 1998 and asked random people on the street who the Best Picture nominees were, a lot of folks would be able to guess them (it helps that that year’s lineup was Titanic, Good Will Hunting, As Good As It Gets, L.A. Confidential and The Full Monty…four of the five of which are all-timers). Those days are never coming back.
Still, if you subscribe to this newsletter you are at least somewhat interested in movies. Right??
And for movie lovers, the Oscars are still like our Super Bowl. It’s still Hollywood’s biggest night. While I’ve long since given up on the idea that the awards are merit-based and are given to the candidates who ran the best campaign rather than always the most deserving — this year’s mudslinging toward Emilia Perez and The Brutalist being perfect examples — it’s still very fun to get excited and speculate about who will win what.
That’s why, for the FIFTH consecutive year, I’m hosting an official No Content For Old Men Oscars Pool!
It’s free to enter with a winner-take-all cash prize pool of $2 per total number of entries. So it would be advantageous for you to get as many people as you can to sign up, to grow the total pot, so consider this your three week notice.
But that’s not all folks! This year’s winner will also receive a free copy of my Cinephile Bucket List … unless you already bought one and don’t want a second.
If you wish to participate, the link below will take you to a Google Survey where you can enter your predictions for each of the 23 categories.
The Oscars are on Sunday, March 2 at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST, so you’ve got a little time to catch up on the movies you may have missed, or more likely, do some internet research to figure out who the oddsmakers like in those categories where you’re totally lost (no shame, it’s exactly what I’ll be doing for animated shorts etc.).
On the Friday before, Feb. 28, I’ll publish my official ballot in that morning’s edition of No Content For Old Men, complete with links to my full reviews of each movie. Last year I finished tied for third place…but this year I’m coming for the gold.
Good luck, and happy Oscars!
https://forms.gle/3LFUByFfSGL3fNKr6
Something New
Love Hurts (Theaters): The fact that this movie could (legitimately) market itself as having two Oscar-winning actors in its lead roles, Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose, for a trashy rom-com action B-movie about a former hit man who has given up a life of crime to become a real estate agent is…funny, but not for the right reasons.
As I’ve said in this newsletter many times, there’s not a lot of utility in me trashing on movies that not many people will see, but this movie is an early contender for bottom five of the year. It has a little of that Madame Web syndrome, were seemingly more than half of the dialogue of the movie is hiding the speaker’s face (so that voice-over can be added after the fact), signaling to me that it was somewhat of a mess to put together. Wildly inconsistent tones and jokes that don’t land, mixed with some mediocre action. Unfortunately, a real miss.
Parthenope (Theaters): Paolo Sorrentino is the spiritual successor to Italian maestros of old like Fellini and Antonioni, and his movies (The Hand of God, The Great Beauty) do carry that same high-minded, abstract sensibility. There’s no two ways around it. These are high art and very pretentious, but if you engage on that level they’re often quite profound.
This one centers around a beautiful woman who is named after the town she’s born in, in the bay of Naples, and her life comes to represent the struggles that that region of Italy has had to adapt to modern society. She is gorgeous, smart, full of potential and yet incapable of doing much with it. Her life unfolds like a tragic fairytale, absolutely incredibly shot and gorgeous to look at (just like lead actress Celeste Dalla Porta) — with a small role for Gary Oldman! — that on the whole I found one of the most confounding moviegoing experiences in quite some time. Unlike a lot of foreign directors who perhaps want to be understood by international audiences, this movie feels SO Italian, almost to an exclusionary degree. Of course, if you know me, you know that makes me only love it more.
I would LOVE to have a conversation about this movie with anyone out there who sees it (I doubt there will be even one). Not for the faint of heart.
Something Old
Rush Hour (1998, Netflix): In a world where every single successful thing from the 90s and 2000s is getting dragged back for legacy sequels, it’s pretty incredible to me that we haven’t gotten a Rush Hour 4 (when it inevitably does happen, you heard it here first). Especially since Netflix added the original trilogy to its library and you’ve got people — like my good friend and this newsletter’s Bad Movie Correspondent Justin B — discovering these movies for the first time.
It’s a quintessential action comedy back in the heyday of the genre, pairing fast-talking Chris Tucker with martial arts master Jackie Chan. It’s super entertaining and works both earnestly as a good movie and ironically as an artifact of a different time in the world. The question Justin and I kept coming back to while watching is just how much of the movie seems unscripted — both because Tucker flies off onto crazy monologues at every opportunity and because Chan didn’t speak much English during filming. Compared to today’s movies, it’s pretty wild to see such loose grip on the reigns. And in this case it really worked out for the better.
Something To Stream
My Blind Brother (Amazon Prime): For some reason I can’t explain, I think I’ve watched just about every movie in Jenny Slate’s filmography. Which is saying something, because she does a lot of movies like this, probably made for sub-10 million about a woman who feels guilt over the death of her boyfriend, so she sleeps with a loser (Nick Kroll) and then without knowing it begins dating his blind brother (Adam Scott). And did I mention her roommate/best friend is Zoe Kazan? (Owner of her own sneaky good filmography.) That’s a ridiculously overqualified cast for what is a pretty straightforward indie rom-com.
With that cast, you might be expecting more riotous laughs, but Kroll is shockingly mostly playing the straight man (no fart jokes!). The movie is still entertaining throughout, and provides that Sundance-style sentimentality that makes for a really easy combination to watch on any given night.
Trailer Watch: Friendship
The film critics who were at the Toronto Film Festival debut of this movie swear up, down and sideways that this is nothing less than the funniest movie to come out in several years. As a big fan of Tim Robinson’s shows (Detroiters, I Think You Should Leave), I assumed that meant something wild and obscure, but this trailer is surprisingly more conventional. I guess that’s what you get when you pair him with Paul Rudd — but let’s not forget Rudd’s Anchorman comedy chops. The line in this trailer “I Love You, Man … for sickos” is probably the best marketing possible. I can’t wait to see it.